"Steven Spielberg doesn't want his upcoming sci-fi flick /www.dreamworksfansite.com/waroftheworlds/"">War of the Worlds compared to producer George Pal's 1953 film version, which he refers to as ""corny.""

In no way is this movie trying to be a remake of the '50s movie, says the film's producer, Kathleen Kennedy. It really is much more inspired by the H.G. Wells [book].

Spielberg confirms this take on his film, pointing out that even online fans have speculated that his aliens will move about in the same mechanical tripods that are described in the novel.

There's not one message that assumes we'll be doing George Pal's boomerangs with the green lights on both wingtips, you know? There's not been one mention that maybe there'll be flying saucers, he says during a break from shooting.

The filmmaker credits Pal for making a film that created a tremendous sense of tension and dread. The 1953 version of ""War"" played on the fears of a paranoid Cold War-era America and wowed audiences with its Oscar-winning special effects.

As a bonus for sci-fi fans, Spielberg has shot cameos of the original films' stars Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, who played Dr. Clayton Forester and Sylvia Van Buren, respectively.

Spielberg's protagonist, played by Tom Cruise, also differs from the Pal hero, a scientist, and Wells' narrator, a cultured man of learning much like Wells himself. Instead, Cruise will play a blue-collar family man and dockworker.

Although Spielberg's version of the story is a contemporary adventure set in America instead of in Wells' England circa 1898, the director has attempted to stay true to the events and spirit of the novel. Kennedy shared some of the details that have made it from the book to film relatively intact.

Almost the entire cellar sequence, for instance, is right out of H.G. Wells, she revealed, referring to a scene in which the book's narrator has just attacked his comrade and is hiding out in the coal cellar when an alien reaches a long tentacle inside to investigate.

Kennedy confirmed that there would indeed be tentacles on the alien, although the being's design is a reinvention of Wells' creature. Spielberg's aliens are also a departure from the originals in that they do not hail from the Red Planet.

The ""black smoke,"" which is a precursor to biological warfare, might not be in the film.

We didn't really stress that as a story element, said Kennedy. The tripods, the red weed: that's really been the predominant iconography.

The red weed is described in Wells' novel as a tropical exuberance [that when it] encountered water it straightway became gigantic and of unparalleled fecundity. Later, the weeds' dying off from terrestrial bacteria is a foreshadowing of the novel's famous ending, in which the Martians begin to wail and cry ""Ulla!"" as they die from disease bacteria.

We have our own version of the ending that neither strays nor mimics the original book, said Spielberg.

Source: /seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/artsentertainment/2002186978_waroftheworlds.html?syndication=rss"">Seattle Times."